By John Waters
When tennis player Rafael Nadal won his twelfth French Open title in 2019, a reporter asked his coach, Uncle Toni Nadal, how the champion had maintained such a high level of intensity through a career spanning nearly 20 years. Pointing to his heart, Uncle Toni quoted Picasso. "Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working. It's [the same] for a painter, a sportsman, a journalist, everyone. Inspiration is good, but it's the work."Something similar can be said of Elliot Ackerman, whose inspiration has also found him working nearly non-stop since he started publishing seven years ago. After spending almost a decade as a Marine infantry officer and paramilitary case officer in the Central Intelligence Agency, Ackerman left behind the profession of arms and began to write, first journalism and later books. His debut novel Green on Blue was published to wide acclaim in 2015, and Ackerman has published three more novels since then (Dark at the Crossing, Waiting for Eden, and Red Dress in Black and White) along with one collection of essays (Places and Names), in addition to dozens of articles and editorials for major publications. And he shows no signs of slowing down. Ackerman will publish his sixth novel, a geopolitical thriller co-written with Admiral James Stavridis in early 2021.
What follows is our conversation about the Marine Corps, his mentors, and Ackerman’s unique approach to writing stories.
Your career in the Marine Corps was brief but action-packed, starting from the time you were still an undergraduate at Tufts University. How did you launch so quickly?
I called people. I managed to bamboozle my way into jump school while I was in the ROTC program at Tufts, and because I was enrolled in a dual-degree program that took an extra year to complete, a total of five years, I had extra time after graduation to spend that “gap year” doing military training. So, I called around to military schools and asked for an extra slot, and that's how I got a seat at dive school. Then, after finishing dive school, I managed to roll right into the Marine Corps amphibious reconnaissance school, which was where I met Doug Zembiec.
You write an essay about Zembiec in your collection, Places and Names. The news media has called him the 'Lion of Fallujah.' What was your relationship with Major Zembiec?
Then-Capt. Doug Zembiec, commanding Company E, 2nd Battalion, 1st Marines, radios orders to his men during combat operations in Fallujah, Iraq, April 8, 2004. (Photo by Sgt Jose E. Guillen)
He was a mentor and we served together. When I think about Doug, I remember how human he was and how he said controversial, annoying things during his lifetime that get lost in all the memorials. He’d be heading out the door and say something like, "alright brother, I'll see you Valhalla." Doug made people cringe sometimes, but he was never faking it. As an example, I can remember seeing him at his house when his wife was expecting, and they were turning his 'man cave' room into a nursery for their newborn baby, and Doug had all of these 'warrior art' paintings on the walls that he demanded stay up for the birth of his child. That was Doug's humanity, but he did annoy some people, and he annoyed them for legitimate reasons. I don't miss the 'Lion of Fallujah' stuff. I miss Doug because he was my friend even though he pissed people off for legitimate things. If I had been feeling down or low about something in the Marine Corps, I would call Doug and he would make things feel clearer for me, he would lift me up. I understand the urge to build memorials and mythologies, but there's a sense of being upset when someone is canonized or turned into a deity or hero because it kills who they actually were.
You led a Marine infantry platoon in the Battle of Fallujah. Your company commander at the time, a Marine named Aaron Cunningham, said you were "both the luckiest and unluckiest lieutenant" in the Marine Corps. What did he mean?
Aaron Cunningham was the best Marine I ever worked for.
Luckiest because, right out of the gate, I got to do the Battle of Fallujah, the biggest urban battle since Hue City. Unluckiest because everything in life afterward was going to feel like a letdown. Cunningham captured the duality of any intense experience, that once you reach the summit, you have to reckon with the descent. I decided to go into the Marines when I was 17, and that was my entire life. By 24, I got to perform at what I thought was the highest possible level, and I was grateful for the chance to express all of the work and preparation I had done up until that point. That was an amazing summit, but the come-down was precipitous, and we were unlucky because it was a tough descent.
One of the really poignant moments was coming home from Iraq. I remember we had just finished a few weeks of our post-deployment leave, and new Marines were showing up to the battalion, new noncommissioned officers and commissioned officers, too. The whole place was in a state of transition from old to new. One particular day the new noncommissioned officers wanted to do a uniform inspection, and so there we were, standing outside of the barracks so these new guys could lay into the young guys, the ones just back from Fallujah, like it was boot camp all over again, like the war never happened. I remember the young guys looking at me like, "really?" It was a bummer, but what was I going to do? That moment encapsulated the descent for me.
I'll say one more thing about the combat experience. I think people have a tendency to equate the intense rush of combat with a feeling of satisfaction, but it's the purpose you feel so strongly and the sense that you're doing everything at the highest level you possibly can. It's not so different from the feeling a world-class athlete probably feels after leaving behind competition.
I suppose that descent includes leaving active duty and becoming a civilian again. Because many veterans struggle to find new purpose in the marketplace, do you believe the free market can be blamed for rejecting veterans’ values and experiences?
I don't think it's the free market, per se, but certainly the military is anathema to American culture. You physically wear your resume on your uniform every day, and experience is more respected than information. When you walk into a room, immediately people want to know what you've done and where you've been and whether you're a 'good dude', which is a comment on experience. I don't find this to exist in the same way in the civilian world.
What was your first ambition when you left active duty?
I wanted to write. Earlier on, I didn't tell anyone I was trying to write because it felt silly to tell people I wanted to write before I had anything to show, but that was my ambition. I wanted to make books, good books. I still do.
Did you go to school to become a writer?
No. I have friends who've come out of fine arts programs and writing workshops and the consensus is that the program offered the space to write and a community of writers. Because I didn’t go to an MFA program, I had to find a community of writers on my own, and I worked jobs that allowed me to carve out time to write.
Could you have become a writer without having gone to war?
My experience in the war certainly informs how I view the world, and that experience is interwoven into who I am, but it's difficult to say how. People who've known me the longest think it was wild I ended up in the Marine Corps, but that it makes sense I'm a writer. I was a dope-smoking skater kid many years ago! Like Walt Whitman said, we all “contain the multitudes.” I agree with that statement.
How do your stories arrive?
In different ways. I like to say that if I'm working on a novel, I equate my job to lighting a field on fire. I picture myself standing alone in a field, banging flint together to get enough sparks going that it will light a flame that catches the whole field, the whole thing, on fire. Fire represents imagination; the flint is observation or experience. My novel Waiting for Eden is a good example. If you've read the book, you remember that the characters complete these forms, service member life insurance forms or "SGLI" forms, before leaving the States for their combat deployment. One of the final things they do is mark off who will get their insurance payout should they never make it home from war, and it’s a heady moment. Well, I have a personal experience filling out those forms and hearing other Marines talk about filling them out before deployment. It's a profound thing to put young people into a room and have them contemplate death and their legacy; it's not something that you forget. In particular, I remember a Marine who married a stripper in the town near our base. The woman was fooling around on him and everybody knew it, and the Marine died in a drunk driving accident. The woman was still his “dependent,” in military parlance, and so she was the one who came to pick up all his belongings from his barracks room. Moments of intensity like that one are what helped make the sparks for Waiting for Eden.
One more thing about that book. The very first reader who took that book, I gave it to him and he came back after one week and said, "it is what it is." That story and those characters just kind of arrived for me. I wanted the book to feel very intimate. I was grappling with the question: What does it mean to stay faithful to someone who is irredeemably not the same? Hopefully, I approach some answer for the reader through the story.
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